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Author Topic: Catherine Leroy - combat photographer  (Read 2219 times)

bayonetbrant

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on: September 05, 2019, 12:42:39 PM
Quote
In February 1967, the U.S. Army launched Operation Junction City, one of the largest operations of the Vietnam War and one that included the only major combat jump of the war. Joining the 173rd Airborne Brigade on their historic mission was a young civilian, Catherine Leroy, a 21-year-old French photographer. Leroy had earned her parachuting certificate as a teenager and had completed 84 jumps prior to her combat jump with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. The morning after her jump, Brig. General John R. Dean pinned on her paratrooper wings, and a gold star signifying a combat jump.

Catherine Leroy worked in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968, during which time she was captured by the North Vietnamese in the fighting in Hue (and talked her way into being released) and wounded in action with the U.S. Marines near Khe Sanh.

At 5 foot nothing and weighing only 85 pounds, she humped the jungles on Vietnam in combat boots two sizes too big – she couldn't find any small enough to fit her size four feet – and carrying near her body weight in camera equipment and other gear. But she was determined to capture the human element of war.

"It took years to get my head back together because I was filled with the sound of death, and the smell of death," said Leroy, who went to work extensively in Lebanon and other parts as a Time magazine photographer.

"On the surface I was extremely cool under fire. I didn't show any emotion; in fact, I didn't show anything. But when I went back to Saigon, sometimes with human brain on my fatigues, the horror of it would hit me, and I would sleep for 20, 30 hours straight."

She was once slapped with a 6-month ban from the front lines for cussing out an officer – in her defense, most of the English words she had learned up to that point had come from hanging out with foul-mouthed grunts, so cussing was about all she could do in English. Fellow journalist Jonathan Randall said “She spoke the most disgusting English. I asked her where she learned it from and she said ‘the Marines’.”

Leroy said being a woman photographer in Vietnam during the conflict wasn't the obstacle one might think. She merely faced the same problems of survival as everyone else. "I was never propositioned or found myself in a difficult situation sexually,"

Leroy said. "When you spend days and nights in the field, you're just as miserable as the men -- and you smell so bad anyway. Basically, you're just trying to survive. But I made myself popular because I was tiny. I'm 5 feet tall and I have no strength, so what I did instead of carrying C rations was bring the wine. I found a place in Saigon that was importing Beaujolais in a can. I'd take a six-pack and maybe one or two C rations, which was the maximum I could carry...Each time I joined a company, I would choose my group of friends, my crew, and we would share everything -- you know, take care of your buddy and your buddy takes care of you . . . I would help them dig a hole, and we would all sleep in it, and there was never any problem, ever."

She does not believe that following soldiers into the field was courageous. “I always felt that it was a great privilege to be with the soldiers,” she says. “To be accepted, to spend a couple of days or maybe a week with them. But I could leave any time, and they couldn’t. Within 48 hours I would be in Saigon, have a long shower and rest. I would be in a French restaurant where the food was nice, where the wine was decent, and I always felt guilty inside. To me, it was as if I was a deserter.”

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